Harry Potter Theory Makes Voldemort's Endgame Way More Disturbing

Voldemort, as played by Ralph Fiennes (and a few others here and there), is really, really disgusting. He kicks off the entire series by trying to murder a literal baby, and stuff pretty much goes downhill from there, whether he's inhabiting the back of a dude's head, haunting an old diary, reuniting with a rat-man, or making a gruesome, evil potion to return to human form. This one fan theory about a potential outcome, though, is so much worse than anyone could have imagined.

On a Reddit thread, u/mitchsix brought up an interesting and completely disturbing theory about Voldemort's possible endgame in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," the book and film where the Dark Lord returns to his full strength after getting his butt kicked by said literal baby over a decade earlier. Basically, the Redditor thought that maybe Voldemort was going to use an appearance-changing potion to impersonate Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), the "Boy who Lived" who serves as inspiration for the entire wizarding world: "That Voldemort's plan in GoF was to kill Harry in the maze and make polyjuice, returning to the games as Harry. He'd decapitate Harry so he could keep making polyjuice and inspire fear in the hearts of the order by making them watch their Chosen One and hero become a Dark Wizard as powerful and evil as Voldy before finally revealing himself to the world with Harry's now bald and decaying skull. F'd up."

This plan is extraordinarily gross and also fascinating, but according to other Redditors, there's one big issue. That appearance-changing potion, the Polyjuice Potion, allows the drinker to transform themselves into someone else's likeness, but that someone else probably has to be alive, as u/OSCgal wrote: "Yeah, I got the idea that Polyjuice requires a living subject." u/mitchsix, the original poster thought this would make the entire thing even darker, though, writing, "That would make this even darker... if he kept poor Harry alive... but Hermoine, Ron and [Dumbledore] would notice somethings up pretty quick."

As Redditors pointed out, this kind of thing did happen in "Harry Potter," and even specifically in "Goblet of Fire," where Death Eater Bartemius Crouch Jr. (David Tennant) spent an entire school year pretending to be Auror and Hogwarts professor Mad-Eye Moody (Brendan Gleeson). Mad-Eye was trapped in a magical trunk, which allowed the junior Crouch to steal hair from him for the potion all year, so this also screws up the theory, as u/StreetlampEsq noted: "I always imagined polyjuice turns you into what they looked like when the hair was grown, otherwise fake moody wouldve looked more and more f**ked up as prisoner moody became emaciated and suffered the other deteriorations of being locked in a trunk for months on end."

Ultimately, Harry would need to be alive for this plan to work. u/OSCgal wrote, "Thing is, as far as we've seen, Polyjuice turns you into a person as they now are, not just their biology and genetics. Like, you get all the scars and injuries the subject may have. So it would follow that if you took hair from a corpse, it would turn you into a corpse."

In case you need a reminder about the general effects of Polyjuice Potion, here's the deal. This incredibly complex, frowned-upon potion — which, despite its absolutely wild implications, isn't illegal in the wizarding world — is found by Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) in a book called "Most Potente Potions" in the Restricted Section of Hogwarts' school library. Essentially, you need a piece of the person you're transforming into, hence the argument about whether or not hair is dead and how a person might turn into a corpse found on that Reddit thread. So how and when do people use the Polyjuice Potion in "Harry Potter?"

People actually use it alarmingly often, although in the vast majority of those times, Harry and his friends are using it for good, not evil. In "Chamber of Secrets," Hermione, a twelve-year-old wizarding prodigy, whips it up so that Harry and their other best friend Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) can impersonate a couple of Slytherins to try and find out who's been unleashing the monster terrorizing the school. As the series draws to a close, the trio uses Polyjuice a bunch of times to impersonate various people, but always in the name of destroying Voldemort — although an example of misuse is certainly Barty Crouch Jr., who imprisoned an Auror for nine full months and kept Mad-Eye in severe health in a trunk just to constantly use Polyjuice Potion.

Yeah, it did. At the beginning of the novel version of "Goblet of Fire," a Muggle man sees Voldemort and his main henchman Peter Pettigrew (Timothy Spall in the films) discussing their plot to find Harry and use him to restore Voldemort to human form, which is exactly what they do. Instead of impersonating Harry, though, Voldemort simply has Barty Crouch Jr. (in disguise as Mad-Eye Moody) turn the Triwizard Cup, which is the winning prize of the multi-school tournament, into a Portkey. 

What ends up happening is that Harry and his fellow Hogwarts champion, Cedric Diggory (Robert Pattinson) take the cup together and decide to tie for first place, only to be transported to a graveyard where Voldemort and Pettigrew are waiting. The two Dark wizards kill Cedric, cruelly referring to him as "the spare," and take Harry's blood for a potion that will allow Voldemort to return to full power. That potion also requires a bone from Voldemort's late father — hence the graveyard part of this whole ordeal — and the flesh of a servant, at which point Pettigrew chops off his arm and offers it to his master. (He gets a shiny silver hand moments later as a reward.)

Voldemort's plan works perhaps too well, and from that point on, he's free to terrorize the wizarding community once again. Let's just be glad, though, that we never had to deal with a fake Harry running around murdering people on a whim.